Hacker News Reader

pshcon C stdlib isn't threadsafe and even safe Rust didn't save us

The underlying problem is that setenv is mutable global state and should never have existed

pshcon Meta's memo to employees rolling back DEI programs

Shouldn’t building dense housing in an area with a terrible housing shortage increase the tax base if anything?

pshcon Nvidia announces next-gen RTX 5090 and RTX 5080 GPUs

DLSS artifacts are pretty obvious to me. Modern games relying on temporal anti aliasing and raytracing tend to be blurry and flickery. I prefer last-gen games at this point, and would love a revival of “brute force” rasterization.

pshcon How to draw an outline in a video game

Dang, I implemented SDFs in 2023 around that time with jump flooding. Wish I had seen this version. Thanks for pointing it out!

pshcon Should more of us be moving to live near friends?

https://archive.is/4hczD

pshcon Lua Is So Underrated

Lua as a language is pretty warty, with some obvious omissions. But it’s widespread as an embedded language, and has been around a long time, and I think that tends to give it a nostalgic halo effect.

I would like to see more minimalist scripting languages with modern sensibilities replace it.

pshcon Includeable minimal operating system for C++

Sounds neat but very minimal:

> Node.js-style callback-based programming - everything happens in one efficient thread with no I/O blocking or unnecessary guest-side context switching.

> No race conditions. Delegated IRQ handling makes race conditions in “userspace” “impossible”. …unless you implement threads yourself (you have the access) or we do.

pshcon UK bans daytime TV ads for cereals, muffins and burgers

The burgers they show on TV are pure junk food, let's be real.

pshcon Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

Yup, that's the one. I have a hard copy on my shelf :)

pshcon The Onion buys Infowars

The money printing started in 2020 under Trump's watch, so if we're going to blame U.S. presidents for inflating prices (?) then it follows that Biden gets credit for the recovery.

pshcon Visual Basic 6 IDE recreated in C#

Mine was "How to Create Adventure Games" by Christopher Lampton (1986) at my municipal library. BASIC code that I entered into my dad's computer, which had QBASIC pre-installed.

pshcon Ractor – a Rust Actor Framework

I have to wonder if Ractor was inspired from The Diamond Age.

pshcon What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?

Yeah honestly I agree like it would be nice if they switched to WebRTC or UDP.

pshcon What happens when you make a move in lichess.org?

> it feels like the SERVER is tracking the time

TBH this is what I expected for all online chess. How else to reconcile the two players' differing clocks and also prevent client-side cheating?

pshcon Optimizing the Ion compiler back end

In modern times I seldom reach for a linked list... cache friendly data structures almost always win.

pshcon Even a single bacterial cell can sense the seasons changing

Bacteria might not satisfy your immediate wants, but they do what you need

pshcon Internet Archive: Security breach alert

IPFS is all content-hash-addressed, so my guess is the IPFS service spirits the files away to a (hopefully) immutable store for the sake of sanity.

pshcon My negative views on Rust (2023)

Yeah, panic/assert is only for Things That Really Shouldn’t Ever Fail, If They Do Our Base Assumptions Have Broken.

whereas Error is for things that are unlikely to fail, like network/filesystem requests and recoverable logic bugs.

pshcon My negative views on Rust (2023)

> Rust does need a better way to do backlinks. You can do it with Rc, RefCell, and Weak, but it involves run-time borrow checks that should never fail. Those should be checked at compile time.

It's not clear to me how rustc could detect a dangling backlink in a tree structure at compile time. Seems impossible short of adding proofs to the type system.

pshcon Differential Transformer

More broadly I think hallucination is inevitable in pure text models. We need model architectures incorporating a stream of real-world ground truth such as a live video feed or embodiment.

pshcon Jazz – Apps with Distributed State

> Jazz Mesh is currently free — and it's set up as the default sync & storage peer in Jazz

How difficult is it to run my own backend?

Edit:

> Completely DIY Mesh.

> Build your own network of sync and storage nodes. Handle networking, security and backups yourself.

> Costs:

> N × instance cost for your sync nodes.

> Very high self-hosted egress costs.

> High self-hosted storage costs.

Compared to Mesh Pro at $79 for 30,000 sync-minutes (“Sync-minutes are counted on a per-connected-device, per-minute basis.”) per month… I bet the cost of self-hosted storage and egress is very low, actually, of course assuming you have the competence and time to DIY it.

pshcon Mira Murati leaves OpenAI

I think it's just code switching. Serious announcements warrant a more serious tone.

pshcon OpenSSH Keystroke Obfuscation Bypass

Sounds good until (for example) you find out the SSH client library wasn't queueing up packets ahead of time, but instead building them at send time, and a chaff packet takes less time to build than a real packet... so many ways to get side-channeled.

pshcon If we want a shift to walking, we need to prioritize dignity

Singapore has covered walkways everywhere to beat the heat.

Also I would love to see more covered bikeways.

pshcon Movable tree CRDTs and Loro's implementation

I think CRDTs make sense for your usecase.

Maintaining the shared state with REST calls that overwrite parts of server state is indeed brittle, and really only suitable for overwriting fields on flat data records. It also requires that you consider server-client state coordination with care at all times, and things can easily get out of sync in non-happy paths.

Like you said, building out a CRDT which specifies how updates are coalesced will significantly reduce cognitive burden.

pshcon A Swiss town banned billboards. Zurich, Bern may soon follow

> I'm waiting for the micropayment platform that lets me pay a cent or two per paywalled/ad supported article instead

I hope for this too. The free internet has grown wildly but now that it’s infested with bots that fundamentally cannot be stopped (without onerous Real ID controls at least) I want an alternative ad-free web that charges micropennies per post.

pshcon Node.js adds experimental support for TypeScript

So many different pairs are available. I like Asian corner brackets 「」and French guillemets « ». The angle brackets 〈〉 are popular in CS/math papers I think, though they might be confused with <>.

pshcon Darwin Machines

> These connections result in a triangular array of connected minicolumns with large gaps of unconnected minicolumns in between. Well, not really unconnected, each of these are connected to their own triangular array.

> Looking down on the brain again, we can imagine projecting a pattern of equilateral triangles - like a fishing net - over the surface. Each vertex in the net will land on a minicolumn within the same network, leaving holes over minicolumns that don't belong to that network. If we were to project nets over the network until every minicolumn was covered by a vertex we would project 50-100 nets.

Around this part I had a difficult time visualizing the intent here. Are there any accompanying diagrams or texts? Thanks for the interesting read!